Plastic is everywhere, from our homes and everyday lives all the way up to the illusorily pristine Arctic. The oceans are no exception—our high seas are accumulating plastic just as fast as we can push it out into the world . In a new paper in Scientific Reports, researchers found that the infamous great Pacific garbage patch contains 16 times more plastic than previous estimates showed, and it seems to be increasing over time. The great Pacific garbage patch is one of six areas of the ocean known to accumulate plastic, located in the north Pacific Ocean. While there is a lot of plastic there, the debris aren’t clumped together like some floating landfill. Instead, the plastics (many of them broken down into teeny tiny pieces) are distributed widely across an area of about 617,000 square miles. This particular study didn’t just trawl the zone with screens to measure the...

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Updated December 25, 2017 15:14:55 Photo: These Christmas hampers come without any plastic wrapping. (ABC News: Hayley Roman) Whether it's food, alcohol or gifts, the holiday season is typically a time of excess. But there is a growing appetite for a low-waste Christmas. Perth's malls have been packed with last-minute shoppers, yet among them was change. "No wrapping paper this year," one shopper said. She planned to give people their gifts simply as purchased. Another shopper said he was trying to limit plastic bags, and any Christmas leftovers would go into his compost pile. "I don't like buying things we already have so they have to wait until they break," said another. Outside supermarkets, trolleys were filled with a mix of plastic and reusable bags, while some customers walked out with items in their arms. Photo: Retailers say reusable coffee cups are high on wish lists this year. (ABC News:...

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So much of the plastic we use is completely unnecessary; give up these items and you won't even miss them. Plastic is so pervasive in our lives that it can hard to understand just what a problem it presents. Without belaboring the point in too many words, consider this: We make nearly a billion tons of plastic every three years. Which is a less painful way of saying we make nearly 2,000,000,000,000 pounds of plastic every three years. According to researchers , if all the plastic made in the last few decades were cling film, there would be enough to put a layer around the whole Earth. With current trends of production, there will be the equivalent of several more such layers by mid-century. In the first 10 years of this century we have manufactured more plastic than in all of the 20th century. Plastic is one of the most...